Louis Columbus summarizes key wireless technologies and the role of Microsoft in streamlining their implementation, including the zero configuration applet included to streamline the overall process of connecting to wireless networks in Windows XP Professional.

The onslaught of wireless products in the last two years has had a strong positive
effect on the development plans of software companies, many of which are enabling
their platforms and applications to support the latest wireless standards. Clearly
an early market dynamic for Microsoft to contend with the release of Windows
XP Professional, there are two dominant networking standards (802.11b and Home
RF) that Microsoft will need to equally address to make Windows XP Professional
and Windows XP Home successful operating systems at their product launch.

What's Microsoft Been Doing on Wireless Protocols?

Having long-standing relationships with many of the 802.11 NIC vendors from
the device driver work done on previous operating systems, Microsoft is working
to improve the roaming experience by automating the process of configuring the
NIC to associate with an available network. The wireless NIC and its NDIS
drivers need to support new NDIS Object Identifiers (OIDs) used for the querying
and setting of device and driver behavior. The NIC will scan for available
networks and pass those to Windows XP. Windows XP has a Wireless Zero
Configuration service that then takes care of configuring the NIC with an
available network.

In the case where there are two networks covering the same area, the user can
configure a preferred network order, and the machine will try each network in
order until it finds an active one. It is even possible to limit association to
only the configured, preferred networks.

If no 802.11 networks are found nearby, Windows XP will configure the NIC to
use ad hoc networking mode. It is possible for the user to configure the
wireless NIC to either disable or be forced into ad hoc mode.

These zero-configuration enhancements are integrated with the security
enhancements so that if authentication fails, another network will be located to
attempt association with.